Thanks to everyone who has responded to the essay I wrote for SLJ about the future of reading and publishing in the US. To answer a few more questions:

1. I am not in any way proposing that physical books are dying as a medium, nor do I imagine some all-digital future for text.

I do believe, however, that the survival of printed text won't matter very much from a business perspective, because the big issue is not the medium but the distribution network.

The distribution network--insofar as it still involves bookstores--is in big trouble. (As pointed out in the essay, the stock price for chain bookstores is a good indicator of how serious a challenge they face.) Whether you buy physical books or ebooks has no bearing on the survival of bookstores; all that matters is where you buy the books, and increasingly we buy them either at Amazon or at Wal-Mart.

2. Several librarians have commented and/or emailed that because they are not collection development specialists, they have little or no say in deciding which titles are purchased or how they are purchased.

I (respectfully and lovingly!) disagree, because, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but:

A. Librarians who work with teenagers and children can affect the circulation of titles in their library by being the ambitious bakers I talk about in the essay; collection development specialists pay close attention to circulation numbers.

B. The idea of "collection development" is a lot broader now than it was back before the Internet. You may not buy the books that get shelved in your library, but you can (if you want) turn your kids on to This Is Not Tom or many other hypertext novels, which amounts to collection development.

C. One may feel at times that collection development specialists listen to any person on the street as much as they listen to branch librarians, but you have (and should have!) advantages over the rest of us: You have more expertise and a deeper knowledge of your patrons. If your library system isn't set up to reflect this, then (imho) they're missing an opportunity.

More questions? Leave 'em in comments. Thanks!